Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

I think if I saw this nine years ago when it came out, I would have been more into it. But I want more out of anime these days than just some, blood, and the aesthetic is just sort of weird and off-putting. I did like it as a story more than the first D movie, although by the end it seemed to be a lot more muddled. I'm guessing it takes place after the first movie, though I'm not sure how many years because of D's whole immortality thing. The Western influences (Western as in cowboys, not western as in American movies. Although Westerns are generally American movies.) are a bit more obvious, especially in a couple scenes that tended to be the most interesting in the film. One of these is the opening, when D is hired to track down a rich man's daughter who's been kidnapped by a vampire and rescue her, or if it's too late, put her to death.

There really wouldn't be very much to the story if it weren't for the Marcus Brothers, a group of mercenaries who have been hired to the same job, with a variety of abilities. They cross paths and butt heads with D a bit, especially Leila, the adopted female of the group. They're not exactly good guys, but they're made to be relatively sympathetic, as they're slowly picked off by the various groups of monsters they encounter while pursuing the vampire. There's a twist eventually, that in most cases would sort of result in the end of the conflict, but not when there's money on the line. It's a pretty solid film until the end, when some pretty incomprehensible stuff starts happening. Like, I was eventually able to make some sort of sense of it after a certain point, but for a while I was totally lost, and I still don't understand a few bits of it. The plot goes in an unexpected direction, and it kind of ends up with no one being totally happy. Which is pretty appropriate for a dark, violent anime like this. Again - it was pretty good. Holds up better than the first film by a lot. But it doesn't exactly feel like 16 years of progress either.

Vampire Hunter D

I don't think I've seen a more thoroughly 80s anime than this. Two animated D films have been released, based on a series of books, sixteen years apart. They feel fairly different thanks to the immense gulf in visual quality that represents, but otherwise they share the common elements that makes the setting unique and kind of weird. It's a crazy mishmash of influences, both post apocalyptic science fiction and horror. It's like a futuristic Gothic action western or something. It takes place many of thousands of years in the future, when humanity is struggling to survive against demons and a society of vampires who all somehow happen to come from nobility. I don't know if the vampirism spread among an elite class that formed after our current civilization was destroyed, or if they made themselves elite because they were vampires. Either way they terrorize normal people, but there are hunters like D who try to stop them, for a price.

D is half vampire himself, and thus an outcast everywhere. He's the strong silent type, although he has a talking hand and rides a robot horse, so he's kind of weird too. He's hired by a young woman to protect him from a local count who's marked her as his next plaything, and so D spends a while fighting off his henchmen and resisting the temptation to get involved in her life anymore than he's being paid to. There's a bunch of other characters to worry about in the town she lives in, some who are all right but mostly they're unreliable. There's some unusual action peppered around along with some more exploitative stuff, before the inevitable final confrontation. It's a reasonably entertaining movie in some parts, but in others it really isn't. Some of the issues can be attributed to the movie's advanced age, but others are just some clumsy storytelling. Overall I'd call it decent, but I don't think they realized the world well enough for it to be better than that. The sequel addressed some of this while having other issues of its own.